


Re-Entry

by Fabrisse



Category: The Martian (2015)
Genre: Gen, Practicalities, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 08:01:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5449295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fabrisse/pseuds/Fabrisse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mark is back among his crew.  How does he handle it?  How do they?  Snapshots and practicalities as the Hermes crew returns to Earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Re-Entry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yeomanrand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeomanrand/gifts).



> A treat for a pinch-hitter.

It was great; really, it was. After spending over a year alone, he missed people, but the reality of people wasn’t something he’d been prepared for. Everything was too loud, too bright, too… too. Mark thought he needed touch, but after the initial hugs, he found himself dreading inadvertent touches. Any touch which he didn’t initiate himself was, at the moment, inadvertent.

Beck touched him the most, of course. After the round of hugs when he first came through the door, Beck took him to the infirmary for a full medical examination. He knew the exact moment when Beck noted his aversion to being touched. They might not have the friendship he’d developed with Martinez, but they’d been tested six ways to Sunday as a harmonious group long before they left earth. Beck recognized his tells, and, Mark thought, he recognized Beck’s. 

***  
After that initial exam, whenever Beck could get away with it, he’d use an analytic which didn’t involve touching. If it couldn’t be avoided, Beck spoke to him softly, warning where he would touch, minimizing it as much as possible.

Beck had also spoken to Captain Lewis about lowering the gravity onboard the ship and gradually moving it back up to the usual 7.5 to 8 m/s² they used on the exterior sections while in transit. Mark’s body wasn’t broken, but he was malnourished, severely underweight, and suffering from the long-term effects of Mars’ 3.7 m/s² gravity. 

Everyone on board agreed to give Mark one extra meal per day until he was approaching a healthy weight. If it meant the rest of them needed to go on short rations toward the end of the journey, it would be the equivalent of a weight loss diet for them rather than the type of extreme shortage he’d faced. At the same meeting, which was held while Mark was under sedation to try to get his circadian rhythm back to Earth standard, Beck had brought up the aversion to touch which he’d noticed. All of them agreed to warn him if touch was required for an activity and to avoid it if possible.

There was nothing else Beck could do. He was the medical officer, but there were no precedents for what Mark had been through. His prescriptions included reading novels, finding music he liked and listening to it often, and a basic weight training workout. After about a month, he added meditation, journaling (which would be shared with a NASA psychiatrist during the monthly info-bursts), and a stretching regimen. He gave Mark a choice of techniques for the meditation and stretching and persuaded NASA to let Mark choose his own psychiatrist. He couldn’t know, not really, what Mark had been through, but he knew that he’d lacked choice. All Beck could do was try to return it to him.

***  
Once Beck had finished with her and dismissed her from the infirmary before dealing with Mark, Melissa took Mark’s suit and, with Vogel's help examined it closely. At some point, she’d send a report home, but at this point, her only record would be locked to her access only. 

Both of them had stopped when they saw the hole punctured in the glove. The immensity of the risk he’d taken, maybe the depth of his despair (or the breadth of his optimism, Melissa really wasn’t certain which), or just the seat-of-the-pants feel to it froze them in place. After a minute, maybe more, Vogel had thrown a wry smile at her and measured the size of the hole. Based on the little bit of telemetry they had for him, Vogel was able to calculate the speed of his exit from the MAV and where his angle had been off.

The most amazing moment came when they unzipped his interior pockets -- laymen didn’t understand why a space suit would have interior pockets. The fact was the suit itself didn’t, but the undersuit, which could be worn alone in the hab, had exterior zippered pockets. Melissa knew one guy who carried a miniature of the book of psalms in the 3x2 pocket at heart level. Mark’s thigh pockets revealed six storage drives. He’d brought back a record of everything he’d done to survive alone for over a year on Mars.

“Melissa?” Vogel reached for one of the drives.

“No, Alex. This is… I’ll ask Chris, as his doctor, whether I should wait for Mark to review them with him or whether I should review them alone. Either way, nothing will be released more widely unless Mark gives permission or…”

“Or doesn’t make it.” Vogel patted her hand, a rare demonstrative moment for them both. “He will. No one can make it through what he has and not make it all the way back.”

“As a human being, I want to believe you. As commander, I know better, sadly.”

Vogel nodded and said, “I had to try. Let’s finish this quickly so I can go write the kids.”

Melissa chuckled. “Of course.”

Beth came in and Vogel said, "What's your carrot to return home?"

"I've been guaranteed a spot in the Boston Marathon." She batted her eyes in a parody of girlishness. “I also have a mani/pedi scheduled for the day we land on earth. Do you know how hard it was to change the appointment?”

“My husband forwarded a reminder notice from my hairdresser in the last info burst. He said if we got Mark back, I’d get a year of free services. If we didn’t he’d charge me double.”

They were both laughing by now, and Vogel shook his head between them. 

Beth said, “I’d think you’d get them for life after this.”

It took them another hour before they’d finished the inspection and inventoried every single patch Mark had made. 

Beth said, “I couldn’t have done it.”

“You’re not a biologist,” Melissa said.

“Even if I’d had Mark’s laptop and information, I couldn’t have done it.”

Alex nodded. "There are times when I think, 'I could do it. To return to my family, I could do it.' But there are other times when I take in the whole scale of it and..."

Chris came in and said, “None of us knows, Alex. If it’s a choice between life and death, I think we’ll all do our best to choose life for as long as we can. It’s part of how we were selected for this.”

Melissa smiled. “You mean they don’t allow someone whose default setting is existential despair on a long term mission?”

“There’s not enough weight allowance for the antidepressants,” Chris said drily.

Beth said, “I’ll go for my run, if you don’t need me, Melissa, Chris?”

“Go ahead,” Melissa said. “Doctor Beck?”

Chris gathered his notes and began to talk about Mark.

***  
Martinez was the first to visit Mark in the infirmary. While Martinez was focusing on the shipboard gossip (thanks to you Beth and Chris have finally started something), they fell into their usual jokes and teasing. The second he mentioned the swing around the earth to get back to Mark, everything ground to a halt.

After a long pause, Mark said, “It’s weird. You look at yourself in the mirror every day, and even when the beard gets a little longer or whatever, you still see the same person. I look at you guys. And I see your faces looking at me, and I know that I’m not the same.”

“You _are_ pretty skinny.”

“You’re the only person I know who can gain weight on our rations, Rick,” Mark said.

“It’s a survival trait.”

Mark said, “I think it’s more likely we think more and our brains use up more calories. Pilots just maneuver things.”

“And a botanist is useless on Mars.”

For a second the old joke hangs between them, and then Mark started to laugh. “The worst part is, you’re right. My primary specialty was definitely the dead weight on this mission. NASA just wanted all the major sciences covered. To inspire school kids, I guess. And then this happened.”

“And not one of us could have done what you did, create a little self sustaining habitat.”

“Yeah, well, that didn’t last long.”

Rick looked at him. “It lasted over an Earth year. Think about that. Over. A. Year.”

Mark just nodded looking solemnly into the distance. “I do know one thing. I will never make fun of _Robinson Crusoe on Mars Again_. Not even the monkey.”

Rick nearly fell off the chair he laughed so hard.

***  
It took nearly a month before Doctor Beck let him out of the infirmary. During that time, Mark ate meals with the others and was allowed to use the gym as long as he was accompanied the whole time. As Chris explained it to the commander, people are more likely to die in their sleep, especially when they’re either returning from an extreme situation or depressed. Staying in the infirmary until he was deemed fully recovered meant that Chris would know the second anything went wrong and could get to Mark in time to -- with luck -- revive him.

Once Chris was reasonably certain Mark wouldn’t seize during the night, he was allowed to go to his own quarters and set his own schedule.

At that point, Melissa asked him to come talk to her about his drives.

“I haven’t looked at any of them. I didn’t even tell NASA they existed. If they ask, I’ll tell them it’s payback for not letting us know about you.”

“What?”

Melissa sighed. “They didn’t want us to know you were alive. That we’d abandoned you.”

“Melissa… Commander, you didn’t abandon me. You saved yourselves when you thought, as any sensible person would, that I’d died. And then you decided to spend close to two extra years in space just to get me back, which … Thank you. Have I said ‘thank you’ yet?”

“Yeah, you did. And if I were on Earth, I might have made the same call they did about telling the crew. But I was up here, and finding out they’d kept it from us pissed me off.”

Mark nodded. “Okay, then.”

Melissa said, “So. Your drives. All six of them.”

“Everything on the Comms, Calcs, and Records drives is, as far as I’m concerned, public information. Or at least as public as NASA wants to make it. Comms are all the typed conversations between me and home, including one or two or fifty that I saved but never sent. Calcs shows how I calculated everything from my food rations to the azimuth for the rover’s antenna. Records...”

“I got it. Which just leaves the other three drives.”

“Diaries. Some typed, most video, and the ones on the rover were voice only.”

“Usually,” Melissa said, “You’d have some choice in how you shared this information. I’d know the fact they existed, and if something went wrong or there were questions about a particular day I could order that date to be shared.”

“Otherwise, they go to NASA with suggested sharing limitations. I know the drill, Melissa. I even know that there’s a percentage marked private, never discussed,” he coughed “19 percent” behind his hand and continued, “over which the psychiatrists will open and read them all anyway.”

“They’re not going to let you have anywhere near nineteen percent of yours marked private.”

Mark said, “Yeah, I worked that out when I decided to pack them in my suit. If I left them on Mars, then, well, the next Ares mission someone would go round them all up and they’d effectively be public to everyone -- or at least everyone at NASA. By bringing them, I have some measure of control.”

“My last info burst had a demand -- they’d probably insist it was a request -- from the psychiatrists, approved by Teddy Sanders -- to debrief you thoroughly and report back in the next infoburst. I told them I was awaiting Doctor Beck’s approval on the medical advisability.”

“Your ability to speak bureaucrat is a marvel to behold, Commander.”

“I can't keep them off our back forever, but I don’t have to tell them I have the cache. Or I can tell them, but exposure to something in Mars’ atmosphere, soil, or whatever managed to erase them, if that’s what you want.”

“I’m too much of a scientist to withhold data. If the three straightforward discs can be compressed sufficiently, go ahead and send them to Earth with the next burst.”

“I can probably compress one sufficiently for the next burst. Which one should it be?”

“Records. Calcs won’t make sense without it and Comms may end up with that horrible magnetic issue you just mentioned. Essentially, they already have everything on Comms. The only parts of interest are the unsent drafts.”

“Which brings us back to the diaries,” Melissa said.

“Yeah. I take it none of my on-board experiments survived.”

“I was in favor of plastic plants,” she quipped. “Actually, most of the plants are still alive. Martinez and Vogel attempted to keep the experiments going, too. Whether we treated them optimally is another matter.”

“So I spend an hour or so a day with my plants, and an hour or so a day trying to regain muscle mass. Why don’t I spend the rest of that time sorting my diary entries?”

“All right. Do you want me to help you with it in order to thoroughly debrief?”

Mark closed his eyes and said, “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but hell no.”

“Can’t blame you for that.” She thought for a moment. “You can take two hours of work time per day and any free time you choose for sorting your diary entries. We’ll spend one hour a day debriefing officially, full recording. That way if those discs end up truncated or even destroyed, we still have something to give NASA. If there are issues from the debriefing which I think need clarification, I may request the diaries for that date or range of dates.”

“Thank you, Commander. That’s more than fair.”

Melissa shook her head. “Nothing about this was fair, Mark.”

“No, it wasn’t.” There was a long pause. “But, Melissa? It also wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

***  
He couldn’t handle an hour a day with the diaries. Some days, he was able to devote more time to the sorting, but on others, Mark would get through one entry, assign it to the appropriate department at NASA, and then put on his headphones and meditate.

Each day while he was stranded, he’d stripped his soul bare, using the entries as a someone to talk to, something to keep himself sane. Listening to them, being able to step back and watch them from the relative safety of the Hermes craft, let him see how close to the edge he’d been both physically and mentally. 

Classification was difficult, too. Everything to do with mechanics went to mechanical engineering and the jet propulsion lab with a recommendation to make the data public after internal review. Everything to do with growing potatoes went to the Space Life and Physical Sciences Research department with a note saying, in effect, “Learn from my awesomeness.” Whenever possible, he redacted anything too personal from those recordings, but, too often, some of the essential information was embedded in the most personal moments. They ended up being a mix of public and internal use only for that reason.

The Human Research Program got every single datum about his physical health, including the times when he stripped naked to allow them to see the toll the experience took on his body. Those moments were nearly impossible for him to watch. He finally asked Chris Beck for help in sorting those messages, so that he could leave the room if it got to be too much. 

It took him some time to decide that all of his personal entries, the stupid, the despairing, the frankly bonkers would go to both the Human Research Program and the Crew Health and Safety departments with the highest classifications and viewing restrictions he could assign _and_ a request for a ten year hold on the data after his death before it could be used for public research. They might not agree to that last request, but he was positive they’d respect the classification and his privacy until his death. He also pulled all the unsent drafts from the Communications disk and sent them “Eyes Only” to CHS to form part of his psychological profile.

The debriefing helped him create a coherent narrative, and he grouped the public or semi-public entries according to the topics and/or date ranges the debriefing established. In the end, he marked less than 2% of his total accumulated messages completely private. 

He was a scientist. 

He was data.

***  
During the final five weeks of the journey to rendezvous with their re-entry craft, Melissa increased the spin of the living quarters to 9 m/s², close to the upper limit those sections could take. It was still below Earth standard gravity, but Beck had convinced her that leaving the gravity at the usual transit level could have serious physical repercussions for Mark on re-entry. She’d also been slowly adjusting the light/dark sequence from Martian Sols to Earth Days, with the bulk of the trip spent at a twenty-five hour cycle since research had determined that to be the preferred day length for most humans.

One of Beck’s official recommendations for the crew’s reassimilation was that they spend one to six months at high altitude (the six months was for Mark, but they’d all been on lighter than Earth gravity for close to four years and would need the assistance). The crews’ families were instructed to meet them at the Marine Mountain Warfare Training Center near the Toyaibe Forest; NASA had arranged time for the official debriefings there.

The last night on Hermes, they dined together formally. There were even little electric candles for atmosphere. 

Mark stared at the potatoes next to the roast beef on his plate. “Do you know how long these could have fed me on Mars? I mean, if the Hab hadn’t blown.”

Martinez raised an eyebrow. “You realize these are going to end up on every flight from here on out.”

Beth said, “You realize they’re going to have you testing how to grow things in toxic dirt and damp shit for the rest of your life.”

“No.” Melissa shook her head. “We’re all heroes.” There were general eyerolls at the description. “Yeah, I feel the same way about it. On the positive side, it means we’ll get our pick of assignments. Knowing NASA, they’ll offer Mark a training position.”

Mark nodded. “In how to grow things in toxic dirt and damp shit.”

Alex said, “What would you suggest as an emergency back up. Can’t weigh more than potatoes for six.”

Mark said, “No idea. It might be worth experimenting with the three sisters, though, or some other form of multicropping to help build usable soil quickly. Better chance of getting necessary nutrients, too.”

Beth chuckled. “You’re already thinking about it.”

Martinez said, “I think he’ll end up teaching the most badass SERE classes ever.”

“What about the rest of you?”

Chris and Beth looked at each other. Finally, Chris said, “Beth’s agreed to marry me. I already have an offer from Crew Health and Safety, mostly working with your documentation, Mark and Beth…”

“There are so many badass things I could do at Canaveral, I may just put them all in a hat and pick that way,” she said.

Martinez said, “I’m technically a mutineer. If I’m not court-martialed, they might let me fly crop dusters.”

“If anyone gets court-martialed, it will be me since I was in command. I need another four years for my twenty, but I have no idea what I’ll be offered or where. I do know that I have an offer from the European Space Agency. They say it’s good whenever I retire. I’ll be training and selecting teams for long, isolated flights, if I take it.”

"If Mark's teaching SERE classes, they'll probably have me come up with an emergency chemical pack to replace damp shit," Alex said.

Mark turned to Martinez and said, “If I’m teaching SERE classes, you need to be teaching emergency maneuvering or something.” He looked around the table. “I wouldn’t be here without you, any of you. Thank you.” He raised his glass in a toast to them all, and they returned it.

After supper, they piped the commander’s playlist through the ship, and for the last time, she tried to teach them all to do the Hustle.


End file.
